Around one billion people are now connected to the internet, representing 89% of global GDP, and internet companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, Expedia and Wikipedia have exploited the global reach of the worldwide web to turn established business models on their head. These companies came out of nowhere and have achieved massive success, but, says Nikesh Arora, Vice-President of European Operations at Google, there is no reason why existing bricks and mortar players in those markets couldn’t have seized the online opportunity first.

“What the internet has demonstrated very powerfully is that no industry or business can afford to believe it is established any more, because small players will come from left field and steal its market,” says Arora. “Even the smallest company, operating out of a garage in the middle of nowhere, can tap into the global economy in a way they could never have done in the past, provided they have a good website and a good product or service.”

He cites the example of Glasses Direct, which was set up in 2004 by a 23-year-old horrified by the margin traditional opticians were making on sales of prescription spectacles. The company now has over 100,000 customers.

Some wise and more established physical organisations have sought to emulate the online pioneers, who have raised the bar in terms of customer service and expectations. But many more companies persist in treating the internet as a sort of ‘bolt-on’ to their operations, an approach that turns away customers who try to do business with them. “They may still be under the illusion that the internet is a passing fancy, but the combined market value of the top five internet companies in the world now exceeds the entire value of the internet market in 1999 before the dotcom crash that many believed – even hoped – would mark the return to the status quo,” says Arora.

The internet is not going to go away. “Around 250 million people now access the internet through broadband, and that number is expected to reach 413 million by the end of the decade. In the UK we are likely reach the critical 70% broadband penetration much faster than the rest of the world. The swift access afforded by a broadband connection means that a company’s website is increasingly customers’ first port of call when seeking information on that business or one of its products, even if they don’t actually purchase online.”

But many organisations seem to find it very difficult to design websites that customers find both easy to use and useful, says Arora. This is unhelpful and frustrating for customers, and explains why 60% of online shopping trolleys are abandoned before the consumer reaches the checkout, as recent research claims. In the real world even one abandoned trolley would trigger alarm bells. But poor websites also have a negative effect on the brand equity of the businesses concerned, because people believe, quite rightly, that those firms just don’t ‘get’ the internet.

Arora says we are just at the beginning of what he believes will be a ten-year internet revolution, and he thinks small businesses will be more successful than their larger competitors, mainly because of the ingrained inertia of bigger companies and their misplaced belief that the internet is irrelevant to them. As he points out, most high street brands’ websites are not our first port of call when looking for information on a product or service. That is a missed opportunity for those brands, he concludes, because, at the very least, “a firm’s website is the best shop window it will ever have.”

Previously published in the Business Review, Impact Executives

Author: Clive Sexton

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